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Is there any time in sports more fun than the Major League Baseball offseason? The hot stove fires up and some entire teams get new faces in a matter of days. When it comes to the MLB hot stove, there is no better time for every fan to “play manager.”
Everyone has an opinion about what can make a team better in any number of categories. You will rarely find another person who wants a team to make all the same offseason moves as you do, and that is what makes it exciting.
We might not have any baseball to watch, but we have a lot of simulated games going on in our heads — trying to figure out whether Jason Bay will be more receptive to a Boston offer soon or will the Yankees choose to lock up their No. 3 starter, John Lackey, following their World Series win.
These heated debates are only made more interesting by the variable that comes in the form of salaries and contracts.
Which team is going to clinch Matt Holliday’s contract, which may be somewhere around $100 million over six to seven years? Which teams would take him for less money or a shorter contract? There are so many pieces to these transactions that you could sit and debate for hours about it.
And I have. When I wake up in the morning and turn on my computer, I check the weather, my e-mail and the boston.com Red Sox forums. It’s a thrill to get to connect with other fans from all over the world to debate these things, no matter how mundane it may seem. The number of fans on the forums has increased year to year, becoming a community of fans who are coping with the loss of the baseball for another year.
The hot stove isn’t completely burning just yet. But soon we will begin to see new rumors on those hot stove baseball blogs and have another opportunity to talk about what type of idea it would be to give Randy Wolf $30 million for three years, or whether the aging Andy Pettitte deserves a more expensive contract after a strong year on the mound for the Yanks.
Baseball fans thrive on any bits of baseball we can get as second as the last outs are made in the playoffs. And when the hot stove starts to burn, so starts the fun.
